The Queen of Attolia (5 page)

“And the Thief?”

“The Thief, Your Majesty?”

Attolia drummed her fingers on the armrest of her chair. She was in a small receiving room to interview the man who collected information for her from various sources. His official title was Secretary of the Archives.

“The Thief, Relius. Is he recovering?”

“Our ambassador in Eddis can provide only limited information these days, but he says Eugenides seems to be recovering slowly. He attends the court dinners about once a week. He seems very little interested in the political situation. It is not discussed on the nights he attends dinner. He doesn’t otherwise leave his rooms.”

“Does he see the queen?”

“Not often. She is very busy, of course.”

“Does he see anyone else?”

“I understand that his father visits from time to time, but he does not invite other company. They say he suffers from nightmares,” he added.

“I’m sure he does.” The queen snorted delicately.

Relius was looking pointedly over her shoulder. Attolia turned to see the ambassador from Medea, who’d entered the room behind her without being announced.

“Nahuseresh,” she said, twisting in her chair to hold
out both of her hands, which he took and bowed over. He was a remarkably attractive man, she thought, or he would be were it not for his beard, which he dyed crimson and divided in the middle and greased into two neatly oiled points. He might, if he remained in Attolia, give up the Medean style of dressing his beard, but he’d been at her court for some time and showed no signs of acclimating. “I didn’t realize that you’d joined us,” she said.

“I have committed a great transgression by sneaking in behind you,” said the Mede. “I beg Your Majesty will condescend to forgive me.” He bowed again and kissed her hands.

“Of course.” The queen smiled. “But give me back my fingers. It is awkward to sit like this.”

The Mede laughed and relinquished her hands.

“You seem very interested in the welfare of this Eddisian, Your Majesty,” said the ambassador. “Surely he’s no threat. What can he do with one hand?”

“I met his grandfather once, many years ago. He told me a thief’s greatest asset, like a queen’s, was his mind.”

“He sounds overly familiar,” said Nahuseresh with disapproval.

“He was, I suppose. But I wasn’t queen then. I wasn’t even a princess of any particular importance.”

“You could have killed this thief.”

“I could have,” Attolia agreed. “This has been as effective and more…satisfying.” She was lying. She
already wished that she’d killed Eugenides and been done with him. She turned back to the secretary.

“Does the queen still call him her Thief?”

“She has done so before the court, several times,” said Relius.

“You must forgive me, Your Majesty,” the Mede said. “Your rituals are arcane, and there remain many with which I am not entirely familiar. Am I right that he was her Thief by virtue of stealing some heirloom and then surrendering it to her?”

“Yes.”

“Your heirloom?” the Mede persisted.

“From a temple in my country.”

“Which was then dropped into the lava of their Sacred Mountain.”

“Heavens, Nahuseresh, you are well versed. What is it you don’t understand?” The queen laughed.

“How could she replace him?” he asked.

“It was a hereditary title for many years,” Attolia answered thoughtfully. “It could go to the child of one of his sisters.” She turned back to her secretary. “What does the court call him?”

“Eugenides,” said the secretary.

The queen nodded. “Of course,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” said the Mede plaintively.

“The Thieves often take the name of their god, so it is like a title as well as a name.”

“I see,” said the Mede.

“I think that will be all for now, Relius,” Attolia said, and dismissed her secretary with a flick of her fingers. When he reached the door, she called him back. “There is one other thing.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” He knew what it was.

“You’ll take care of it?”

“Immediately, Your Majesty.”

The master of Her Majesty’s spies bowed carefully before slipping out the door to put his not inconsiderable energies into discovering how the Medean ambassador came to interrupt the queen and to do so without being announced.

Nahuseresh excused himself not long after and returned to the rooms allotted to him and his ambassadorial party. His own secretary waited for him there.

“The messenger from the Three Cities brought a message to you from the emperor,” the secretary warned him. “It is with your papers.”

Nahuseresh found it there, folded and sealed. However, the seal was broken. Nahuseresh examined the folding carefully in order to open the papers without tearing them. Each of the folds was crisp and complete. It had not been opened and refolded. He glanced over at his secretary, who smiled.

“I didn’t recognize the pattern,” the secretary admitted, “so I left it.”

“I’ll teach it to you someday soon, Kamet,”
Nahuseresh promised while glancing over the message. “The emperor catalogs the gold we have given the barbarian queen and asks if we have struck a bargain together and received a receipt for our purchases.”

“He is early in pressing for success, isn’t he?” the secretary asked.

“He doesn’t press as much as he urges us to make haste,” Nahuseresh corrected him, eyes still on the paper he held.

“Haste hasn’t made his empire,” Kamet pointed out.

“It is unlike him,” Nahuseresh agreed. “But no doubt he has his reasons.” He refolded the message and dropped it onto his desk. “Try working out the folds yourself. Let me know if you need help. We will send a message to the emperor this evening saying we hope the queen will remain preoccupied with her Eddisian Thief while we work. You have spoken with the servants in Baron Erondites’s household?”

“I’ve spoken with them. Not ingratiated myself. They’re a little reserved yet, not sure where I fit in their hierarchy.”

“I see.”

“They don’t have many slaves here,” Kamet observed.

Nahuseresh shook his head. “No. They have a relatively small population and not a great deal of wealth.”

“I could run away and make myself a free man,” joked Kamet.

“Oh, I’d find you.” Nahuseresh smiled. The slave’s almond-shaped eyes and red-brown complexion would set him apart from the residents of Attolia. “What do you think of Baron Erondites so far?”

“He’s a likely one, very sleek. Thinks well of himself. What do you think of the Attolian queen?”

“She’s quite beautiful,” Nahuseresh said.

“Yes?” prompted Kamet.

“And she has the most appealing of feminine virtues, especially in a queen. She’s easily led,” said Nahuseresh, smiling.

“She’s held the throne for some time,” the secretary said cautiously.

“She secured her throne with brilliant tactics early on that were no doubt those of an advisor, probably the Baron Oronus, or Erondites’s father. Whichever of them it was, they are both dead now. She has been shrewd or perhaps lucky in advisors so far. She has to choose another if she hopes to work her way out of her present difficulties.”

“The one with the most gold?” Kamet asked.

“One hopes so,” said Nahuseresh.

When Attolia was dressed for bed and her hair was carefully combed and braided, she sent away her attendants and wandered slowly through her chambers. She ran her hand across the covers of the bed, turned back invitingly, but didn’t get in. She gathered her robes
around herself and sat in a chair by the window, looking out at the night sky. After a while she relaxed enough to drum her fingers on the arm of the chair.

“I should have hanged him,” she said out loud.

She said nothing else, and the room was silent as the moon sailed slowly over the roofs of the palace and eventually dropped its light through the window to the carpet by her feet. Exhausted, she finally went to bed and slept without dreaming.

A
S THE WINTER PASSED, HE
forced himself to get up in the morning, even if it was only to sit in the chair at the foot of his bed to watch the fire in the fireplace. Some days he practiced his handwriting. In the night, when the palace was quiet, he woke and lay in bed for hours, staring at the shadows the fire cast on his ceiling. It was a thief’s time, the middle of the night. Old habits died hard, and he couldn’t sleep. He counted himself lucky if he didn’t wake screaming and was glad that when he did have nightmares, there was no other apartment near the library where people might hear him.

In the late winter he was still working on his handwriting and studying the books and scrolls from the library. He was reading a text on a system for categorizing plants and animals when someone knocked at his door. He looked up to find a man standing in his doorway. Beside him, as if he’d just put it down, was a square leather box with a handle on top.

“Can I help you?” Eugenides asked, puzzled.

“They sent me up to show you some things,” the man said awkwardly.

Eugenides had no trouble fitting a number of people into the category “they.” “What things?” he asked.

The man pushed his box a little closer to where Eugenides sat. He unlatched and lifted the top to display the contents. Held in place by leather straps was an assortment of prosthetics: false hands and hooks. The hands were carved from wood, some of them fists, some partly open. The hooks were set in shiny brass or silver cups, inlaid or plain.

“Get out,” said Eugenides.

“Young sir,” the man protested.

“Get out!”

“When you’ve looked.” The man stood his ground.

Eugenides got up from his chair and, after the briefest of looks into the box, fled. He strode across the library and slammed its door behind him.

Eugenides went down the hallway past several startled servants and was running up stairs two at a time before he realized that he didn’t want to go to the roof. On a fine day in late winter it would be peopled with ladies walking the lookouts, tired of being shut in by the cold. He racked his brains to think of a refuge, but the library was his refuge, and he’d been driven out. After a moment he turned and went back down the stairs and
along the hall to another flight of steps, hurrying past people without speaking, thankful that he was dressed in clothes and not in his robe, as he often was in the morning, until he remembered that he was dressed only because his father’s valet had stopped in that morning to prod him, no doubt in anticipation of his visitor. The thought made him savage, and the valet was lucky to be far away.

He left the palace by way of a tiny courtyard that had a door in its stone wall that let him out onto a grass-covered slope.

There was a paved path of white stones that led uphill from the gate to intersect the wider pavement of the Sacred Way. The Sacred Way swept back and forth across the hillside working up to the great temple of Hephestia, which overlooked the palace.

There were still patches of snow in the shade, and the wind blew through his thin shirt. The hill was steep, and he was quickly out of breath, but he climbed on until he reached the empty porch of the temple. He turned to look down at the palace, but there was no one climbing the Sacred Way behind him. He went through the main doors, twenty feet high and open to the cold air, into the pronaos of the temple. The smaller set of doors that led into the naos was also open.

As he passed from the pronaos into the naos, his footsteps were quiet from habit. The altar was deserted. The incense burned in braziers unattended by a priest,
and there was no sign of supplicants, or of a recent sacrifice. The great gilded statue of Hephestia looked down on no one but Eugenides. He walked to the alcove just before the great altar, where there was a smaller altar dedicated to Eugenides, God of Thieves. A curtain provided privacy to supplicants. Eugenides pulled it closed and sat on one of the marble benches that ran along either side of the alcove. He lifted his feet up onto the bench, out of sight of any casual glance under the curtain, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

He’d left his room without his sling. He wondered if anyone had had time to stare when he was hurrying past. He tilted his head back against the marble walls behind him and closed his eyes. He didn’t look at the altar, decorated with an assortment of objects stolen by his ancestors and himself. He hadn’t come to pray. He’d come to hide.

The stars were out when Eugenides picked his way carefully down the road from the temple. He shivered as he slipped through the doorway into the courtyard and nodded to a guard as he entered the palace. The hallways were empty, and he passed no one else on the way back to his rooms.

The library doors were open, and the light from the fireplace inside flickered in the dark hall. He paused at the doorway to look in and saw his father
and the queen sitting in silence in his armchairs, waiting for him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

They both stood. Eugenides looked at his father. “I was in the temple,” he said.

“We knew that,” the queen replied. “You could hardly be dragged home from there without risking a rain of thunderbolts, and now that you’ve been safe from being disturbed all day, you’re blue with cold. Sit at the fire.”

Eugenides didn’t sit by the fire; he lay down on the hearth in front of it, close enough to be burned by stray sparks, and pillowed his head on his arms, shuddering from the cold.

“Cowardice has its own rewards,” his father observed, looking down at him.

“More than you guess.” Eugenides spoke into his arms. “Moira came. She brought me a message from the gods.”

The queen and his father were silent. Eugenides rolled over on his back to warm his other side. He stared at the ceiling. He knew that after the destruction of Hamiathes’s Gift the year before, what had seemed an indelible belief in the goddess-given authority of the Gift had slowly faded from most people’s minds, until the gods were once again a vague possibility instead of a nerve-racking reality—even for his father. He counted on Eddis, who had held the Gift, to believe still in the
immortals. She looked suitably wary, whereas his father looked only politely interested.

“Stop whining,” Eugenides said.

“What?” Eddis’s expression shifted from wary to puzzled.

“That was the message. For me, alone among mortals, the gods send their messenger to tell me to stop whining. That’ll teach me to go hide in a temple.”

“Eugenides—” said Eddis.

“And I thought that I was doing fairly well,” he said bitterly.

“You’ve been locked in your room all winter practicing your handwriting,” Eddis said.

“Yes,” said Eugenides.

“And what did you plan to do when your handwriting was perfect?” his father asked.

Eugenides sat up and shifted to lean against the heated stones beside the fireplace, with his legs stretched out in front of the fire to warm. “I thought I might go to one of the universities on the Peninsula,” he said at last. “I thought that if I went away to study, I could come back in a few years and be…useful.”

He pulled his knees up. “I’m sorry.” He shrugged. “I thought it was a good plan.”

Eddis looked at him helplessly and then at his father. The minister of war bent forward to put a hand under his son’s armpit and lift him to his feet. “Bedtime, I think,” he said. “We can discuss messages
from the gods when we’ve had some sleep. Things,” he said, looking at the queen, “are sometimes not as they appear.”

The queen left, and the minister helped his son to bed with a minimum of words. He pulled the overshirt and undershirt over Eugenides’s head with a sharp tug, then directed him to the bed.

“Sit,” he said.

Eugenides sat, and his father pulled off the rest of his clothes and dropped a nightshirt over his head. Then he pushed his son down onto the bed and pulled the covers over him.

“You can wash in the morning,” he said.

Eugenides lay with his head on his pillows, looking up at the ceiling.

“Do you need to eat?” his father asked.

“I ate the ceremonial bread in the temple.”

His father shook his head in wonder. “No lightning bolts?” he asked.

“Not one,” said Eugenides.

“How fortunate.” He went to the door and stopped. “That business of going to the Peninsula to study…”

“What about it?”

“It was a reasonable idea.”

Was? Eugenides wondered as he fell asleep.